Natural Teams

What are Natural Teams?

There are two key reasons for natural team to exist:  geographic and financial.  Regarding the geographic reason, people cannot always get to Northampton, decide to stay in their hometowns or wish to continue growing roots in some other location.  Regarding the financial, for some folks having a team in Northampton with the established community of professionals is financially impossible.  The hope is that sometimes a natural team, in a familiar location, perhaps closer to home and other familiar resources can cost less money over the long run.

Different types of Natural Teams

Windhorse communities have several different options for team constellations.  In fact, during a client's participation in the program, the constellation of team members usually changes over time.  The basic intention is that the team will "dissolve" over time while the client becomes established with more activities outside of the therapeutic environment. A full moderate team includes a Team Leader, Psychotherapist, Team Counselor, Peer Counselor, in some cases a Psychiatrist, and a Nurse.  Some teams are partials of that.  Other teams are considered Clinical Mentorships, where a client has only a single Clinician doing Basic Attendance shifts one or two times each week.

Natural teams are similar to these prototypical Windhorse teams in that some of these roles must be consistent.  However, the nature of a natural team may be that the players on the team may tend more to be non-professionals. At least that is the intention.

Here are some of the necessary elements of a Natural Team consultation that we can provide:

Initial Assessment.  First we will need to learn about the person's basic situation and understand what kinds of needs they have.  We will need to assess what resources are available within that person's Natural Team.  How many people are willing to help?  How much time can they commit?  What skills and strengths are represented on the team?  If needed, does the person have insurance to cover the cost of a psychiatrist, a primary care physician, and a psychotherapist?  Can other volunteers be recruited?  And perhaps most importantly, is there someone who is willing and able to function as a Team Leader to coordinate the team and be a liaison with other providers?  If it appears that there are adequate resources available, then we could proceed.

Orientation and Training.  Once we have assessed that the Natural Team can provide adequate support to meet a person's needs, we would orient and train this group in the fundamentals of the Windhorse approach.  This would include (at least) exploring theory and practice in the following areas:

A whole-person approach that attends to body, mind, relationships and environment.

Please contact our Director of Clinical Operations at  413-586-0207 x 102 for more information.

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